European Union

A few years ago, Simon invented a game to model coalitions in the European Parliament (also described here and here). I decided to try it in my comparative politics as a lesson in how legislatures function. After some confusion as students figured out what to do, they clustered into two coalitions; the outcome loosely resembled a two-party/median voter system. But I had forgotten to remove the high-value cards from the deck before starting the game. The class has only fourteen students, and the distribution of card values was so great that it was difficult for students to accumulate influence points.

I decided to run the game again in the next class, after removing face cards from the deck. Influence points were calculated the same as before. But I added a twist. Each student received additional instructions that varied according to the value of his or her card: Continue reading →

A while back, I wrote about running a sim on Brexit, the UK’s departure from the EU. (Obviously, ‘departure’ makes it sound grand and stately, rather than the big old mess that it more actually resembles, but I digress). In it, I asked if anyone was up for working together on doing this.

Last week, I covered some ways you might tackle the current state of British politics, after the EU referendum.

Following that, I’ve had some conversations about running a joint simulation during the autumn semester, across institutions, so if you’d be interested in joining that, then drop me a line (s.usherwoodATsurrey.ac.uk) and we’ll see what we can work up.

This is a good example of how you can manage bigger subjects – by working with partners in other institutions – albeit with some associated transaction costs. The upside is not simply more bodies to take on roles, but also the introduction of a dynamic that gets students speaking to strangers, remotely, which is not untypical of political negotiations.

Putting that to one side, I’d liek to briefly consider yet another avenue for teaching Brexit, namely a more legal approach. Continue reading →

In the spirit of not wasting a good crisis, the UK’s decision to leave the European Union offers a great way into understanding a number of political dynamics.

Of course, we need to tread a bit carefully here, for a number of reasons. Firstly, this is a highly fluid situation, so whatever one might plan for the autumn might be completely overtaken by events. Secondly, some of the things that have happened over the past week are so extreme and atypical that while you might reproduce them in a simulation setting, you are almost certainly never going to see them happen again. Thirdly, there’s an awful lot going on, so you need to pick your targets clearly.

With all those caveats in mind, some options still present themselves.

Most obviously, there is going to a negotiation to agree the terms of the UK’s exit, as per Art.50 TEU. Now, as I don’t need to tell you (but maybe do need to tell some of the campaigners), this means the other member states agree a position, then negotiate with the UK to reach an agreement, which is then approved by all (plus the European Parliament (EP)).

This would work well with a large group, representing as many of the different parties as you like, using whatever protocol the EU finally establishes for this (probably available in the autumn), or just the same rough approach I set out in a different EU-crisis scenario earlier this year. The need for EP approval adds a nice little twist, as member states will have to take account of it throughout the negotiations, while simultaneously thinking how they can make sure MEPs don’t make life any more complicated than it already is.

The difficulties will be primarily one of scale: with up to 28 states, can students find enough material to support their negotiating briefs? I’m aware of some groups that are pulling together such intel, but even this will be relatively brief, especially if your negotiation gets into any substantive issues (which it most likely would). One way around this would to limit discussion to core principles and a framework deal, or to a particular area of policy.

The second obvious option to pursue is one focused on the domestic politics of the situation. Here, a Parliamentary debate might be in order, either on confirming the result of the referendum, or an outline negotiating brief for the government in the Art.50 talks, or on motion of no confidence (this one is a bit further down the line). This let’s students get into party politics (both at the inter- and intra-party levels) and ties in nicely with all the other shenanigans going on in Westminister these days.

The third option draws a bit from both of the first, by focusing on any one actor in this process and drawing up a detailed negotiating brief for them: the UK, another member state, the EP, the European Council President or the Commission. This gets much deeper into substantive issues, so it’s best suited to those who already know about the workings of the EU, including any law students you can drag in: you could do this with a much smaller group, or even run parallel groups. Moreover, given the apparent lack of planning that was done before the vote, you could probably then send your final brief to that institution and have a good chance that they’d use it.

Finally, you could step out of the narrowly political perspective and look at the impact of Brexit on something else, such as an industrial sector, or a company. Here the work would be an impact assessment and could range as widely as you like (business students are an obvious addition). This option is best for those who don’t normally teach the EU, or who are teaching outside Europe, since there will be global political and economic repercussions: consider, for example, impacts on NATO and US foreign or trade policy.

As always, the key consideration should be that you are clear about your learning objectives: what do you want to achieve from this? If you can keep this clear, then you’ve got some great opportunities waiting for you.

My class is on Britain and the EU and my students are drowning in material. As well as all the usual reading lists that exist, there’s also a mountain of stuff for non-specialist audiences, because of the looming referendum here in the UK.

It’s going to sound very pretentious, but all this travel is very disorientating. Exactly one week ago, I was sat in a seminar room in Hong Kong, helping people design simulation games, something that now feels simultaneously very familiar and very distant.

Amanda and I have posted already about these workshops (here), but given some of the things I’ve been doing since then, I wanted to pick up on a broader theme, namely of how we ourselves learn from the teaching we do.

Last night, I was in London, taking part in a panel discussion about Britain and the EU, as part of my other work, with an audience of school children. And that sentence already contains my first error.

I was going to give you a quick write-up of my EU game, which I ran last week.* However, as news comes in of the explosions in Brussels, I’m taking a very different topic.

About four days ago, I was going through Maalbeek metro station, with my students and my colleagues and their students: about 30-35 of us in all, to go and listen to a talk in one of the Commission units. Continue reading →

For someone who’s supposed to be a scholar on the EU, I don’t do many games about the EU. That’s because there are plenty of options out there, plus I don’t often have reason to run these kinds of games, which normally need a significant number of students. Plus, it’s hard to do something that’s different.

However, fortune occasionally brings forth moments to change matters, and this is just such a moment.

As part of the INOTLES project, we’ve been running an online module with students from nine European institutions, learning about the EU. As a capstone, we’re spending most of this week in Brussels, doing a variety of activities, visiting institutions, and trying the local produce. Continue reading →

This guest post from Alexandra Mihai (IES, Brussels) was originally published on her blog, The Educationalist

Having been working for about nine years on designing and delivering technology-enhanced courses on European Studies, I became familiar with the community of politics/ IR scholars who adopted technology and integrates it- to different degrees—in their teaching practice. Very soon I came to realise that this is actually “a bubble within a bubble”, a small part of the group of academics interested in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, i.e. in reflecting on and conducting research activities surrounding their pedagogical practice.

While regularly attending various international e-learning conferences, I quickly became aware of the fact that, while social sciences in general were less represented, politics/ IR were a pretty rare occurrence. This intrigued me and prompted me to look around myself, talk to my colleagues and peers and try to find out if this is indeed the case, if politics scholars are slower and more reluctant in adopting technology and using it in teaching than their peers from other disciplines. A few years and many conferences and workshops later, my experience confirms what I had intuitively known all along.

Guest author Jon Worth works across Europe, offering consultancy on a range of subject areas. This post was originally posted on his own blog and is reproduced with his permission.

For the first time in the academic year 2015-16 I am a member of the faculty of the politics department at the College of Europe in Bruges. My own MA is from the College of Europe (in 2003-04) and it is good to be back there as a teacher this time. The College operates a system of a kind of flying faculty – we are called upon to run courses or seminars, but are not actually based in Bruges. My own course is a short, optional one entitled Online Communications in EU policymaking, but this post concerns my contribution to a compulsory course for all 96 politics MA students run by Pierpaolo Settembri andCostanza Hermanin – the EU legislation simulation game.

The basic idea of the simulation game is relatively well known – each student gets allocated a role, and all of the aspects of an EU legislative negotiation are played out by the students playing these roles. Pierpaolo is the author of a book about how to use these sorts of games to teach about the EU. Continue reading →